January 5, 2001

Fish Tale: Falling for a Live One

By PHILLIP LOPATE

At 4 in the morning the Fulton Fish Market is lighted up like a stadium night game. The lights, mounted high on lampposts and rooftops, create "day for night," as they say on movie sets. The wholesale companies have unloaded and set out their wares in the post-midnight hours, and now the customers (mostly restaurants and retail fish stores) have started arriving. For the next few hours it's like a performance piece, an elaborate opera about fish love.

Approaching from the north end, through a big parking lot that lies under the viaduct supporting the Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive just south of the Brooklyn Bridge, you'd better look lively, because panel trucks, forklifts and hand trucks bear down from all directions. Here, pedestrians don't have right of way; if you're just there to gape you'll be dissonantly conspicuous in this symphony of purpose. Wholesalers, loaders, journeymen, salesmen, watchmen, inspectors, cutters: everyone's got a function. The overall impression is that of old-fashioned work, proletarian sweat, the kind that one had almost given up seeing on the streets of postmodernist New York.

A fish market has stood on this site, at East River Piers 17 and 18 between Peck Slip and Fulton Street, since 1834. It used to be part of a larger all-purpose market, open day and night, that sold everything from ice cream to books to petticoats to hardware and fish; its oysters had a worldwide reputation.

The present Fulton Market spreads onto both sides of South Street: the smaller, more modest fish-sellers operate in cavelike stalls carved out of the ground floors of Federal-style brick buildings while across the street on the river side, two tin-roofed sheds that constitute the Market Building house the larger wholesale firms. That tin pavilion was built in 1907 and suffered a suspicious fire in 1996, but has since been restored to its frontless, functional, breathtakingly unadorned state.

I meet up with David Pasternack, chef and co-owner of one of the city's best fish restaurants, Esca. I'm not sure I would have had the nerve to explore the market in the wee hours without a guide. Mr. Pasternack, an athletic-looking man, is twitchy from intensity and lack of sleep.

"When do you sleep?" I ask him.

"Never. Sunday. Though this Sunday I'm supposed to go tuna fishing on Long Island." Mr. Pasternack loves to fish. His fantasy is retiring to indulge his hobby full time.

Mr. Pasternack usually starts his rounds at Blue Ribbon Fish Company, one of the more established, respected firms. It was begun in 1931 by the grandfather of its present owner, David Samuels. Traditionally the fish market has been the province of Italians and Jews, though in recent years Koreans have entered it, as well as a few Portuguese and Greeks.

"What do you got that's stylish?" Mr. Pasternack asks Mr. Samuels.

Mr. Samuels replies, "We got some pretty good monkfish." He shows them to his customer.

Mr. Pasternack says, "I'll take a box," and begins a fishing story.

Mr. Samuels interrupts: "I have no idea what he's talking about. I never caught a fish in my life."

Mr. Samuels, in his soiled white apron and jeans, looks a bit like Walter Matthau and has some of that actor's rumpled charm, world-weariness and dry humor. A third-generation fishmonger, he began working summers at the fish market on his 16th birthday. A corpse turned up that first day, and he said he thought, "Oh boy, this is going to be some experience." No bodies since, he says.

"Got any red snapper?" asks Mr. Pasternack.

Mr. Samuels says, with a trace of self-mockery: "Come on, I'll show you. This is a 10. This is as good as it gets."

The two men seem to enjoy each other. Regular customers are crucial to the Fulton Fish Market, and it's equally important for buyers to establish close ties with wholesalers because here everything is based on trust. "If he gives me bad fish he'd be hearing from me next day, so what's the point?" Mr. Pasternack says later. "He always tells me the truth." Conversely, if a customer stiffed a wholesaler, he would never be sold to again. It's a closed world, a club, like the diamond district, where one's word of honor means something.

Watch Your Back!

The men of the market are all dressed in knockabout zhlub. Footwear consists of boots and old shoes because the floor is one big puddle.

"Watch your back! Watch your back!" is an endless cry. It's impossible to stand idly in one place for very long. "Excuse me!" a journeyman says, aggrieved, coming through with his hand truck no matter what.

Without my having noticed, Mr. Samuels has faded from Mr. Pasternack's side. There is a protocol to this dealing: the inventory facts emerge little by little. A circling, with very little eye contact; the pressure to buy is minimized that way. Conversations break off easily; the customer wanders over to another aisle, comparison shopping, then back to the first. If anything, it seems a sellers' market: the buyer has to keep pressing to get straight answers from fish stall operators. The old Italians who like to gab with one another are in no hurry to push their goods, as if surely the lot will be taken off their hands before daybreak.

Mr. Pasternack is now over at the northern shed, where Gino is holding forth. A man in his 60's, with a grizzled three-day growth, teeth missing, easily roused to a volatility that no one takes that seriously, Gino is offering slices of raw octopus to sample. I munch on one. It's good. I have the sense that I'm being watched, my mettle evaluated.

"Bet you never ate octopus at 4 in the morning in a fish market," he says to me.

"You're right about that."

Mr. Pasternack needs sea urchins, and he is trying to coax Gino. For a good customer, there's often "something in back" when the supply seems exhausted in front.

"Come on, give me half a box."

"I can't. I promised it to the other guy."

"So tell him half for me, half for him."

No dice. This time Gino really has no more sea urchins, in back or front.

And there's very little shellfish tonight: "The truck broke down in Long Island."

Coffee and Attitude

It's a male environment, with the exception of two or three middle- aged Asian buyers who are women. Mr. Samuels's handsome cousin struts around with a halibut held in front of him. "Hey, don't hurt anybody with that thing!" a co-worker yells. Mr. Pasternack turns to me and says, "All these guys are related."

Nicknames abound and there's an atmosphere of camaraderie, based partly, I would imagine, on the sharing of tough working conditions: pulling night hours outside in all weathers, getting doused by fish water, digging one's hands into ice. Those who work in the fish market are prone to rheumatism, arthritis, heart trouble, cancer and a shorter life span.

Men for whom family comes first, their crew is like a second family. When the Organized Crime Control Bureau investigated the fish market for extortion, income tax evasion and tapping (the practice of swiping a few fish out of the box), it was frustrated by stonewalling. Though the mob seems to have been cleaned out now for the most part, knots of men still stand around affecting a wise- guy swagger. I am introduced to an affable, beefy guy with an enormous chest and thin legs. "This guy used to be an enforcer," says Mr. Pasternack.

"Get outta here," the guy answers.

A coffee wagon in the middle of the shed dispenses caffeine and crullers. I notice a little recreational area along the river's edge at Peck Slip where a few workmen break for cigarettes and coffee. This sliver of park has benches and informational plaques that say ships used to tie up here while three adjoining warehouses received their goods. All that's left of those days are some massive lead mooring posts, kept, I suppose, as ornamental reminders.

Adventures in Dining

Mr. Pasternack points out a young, athletic-looking Korean stall owner who is climbing over his stock, seemingly more eager to unpack crates than sell, moving emptied boxes out of the way with a grappling hook and replacing them with ready-to-move merchandise. "See that guy? He's big. He's the one who first brought in white salmon."

Nowadays there are many more imports as fish is flown in from all over the world. There is yellowfin tuna and mahi-mahi from Fiji and Hawaii, halibut from the West Coast and fish from the Caribbean.

Fifty years ago New Yorkers ate little more than flounder, codfish and shrimp, but their tastes have grown more adventurous and cosmopolitan as the city's demographics have changed. Philippine, Thai, Korean, West Indian, Dominican, Haitian and Indian cuisines have all widened the fish-eater's palate, just as Japanese sushi taught people to appreciate the once-disdained tuna. Fish also has to be much fresher now, as the new- cuisine methods of preparing it have edged toward medium-rare and the clientele has become more demanding.

Stiff, Clear and Blood-Red

I am following Mr. Pasternack, trying to ascertain his principles of choice. He sniffs a bluefish here, pokes a mackerel there. "What are you looking for?" I ask.

"If it's stiff," he says as if the answer were self-evident. Clear eyes and blood-red sacs are also signs of freshness. "With tuna, it's all in the color or the fat."

In a way, the buyers and sellers live for fish. They're like enthusiasts at a comic book convention. They'll talk about different species by the hour, how to catch this, how to prepare that. ("Whiting is great for frying up. A little tartar sauce on the side — mmm!") On the other hand, there's a nonchalance bordering on disrespect toward the product. Filleters, master craftsmen in their art, dribble cigarette ash with one hand, slicing and boning with the other. One guy drags a decapitated swordfish along the ground, not even bothering to lift it. "Why should I?" he seems to be saying. "Dead is dead."

Thursday morning is the busiest selling day at Fulton Market because the restaurants stock up for the weekends. A buyer for the Oyster Bar — round cheeks, professorial glasses, spotless white apron — chats with Mr. Pasternack at the Blue Ribbon stalls, talking about fish prices and how only one of their competitors can afford to spend outrageous amounts for the most exotic types. Mr. Pasternack says gloomily, "People don't understand that quality fish costs us, too."

I'm dodging crowds. Wherever I look, there's activity, but my guide apologizes. "Tonight the market's slow," he says. "The weather was lousy earlier in the week, and the boats didn't go out, so there's less product than usual."

I've been told by old-timers that there used to be a lot more fish, quantitatively speaking, in the market. The number of companies has shrunk to 50 from 187 a few decades ago. I ask Mr. Samuels if he thinks the fish market is an endangered species.

"Fresh fish is something that has to be purchased by eye," Mr. Samuels reminds me. "There'll always be a need for a wholesale fish market."

Tradition, Tradition

That doesn't mean it will always be in Lower Manhattan. At Fulton Market, fish stopped arriving by water in the early 1970's, partly because New York harbor was too polluted to supply a local catch and partly because it was less labor-intensive to load the fish onto refrigerated trucks in New Bedford, Baltimore, Canada and Florida. Somehow the fact that the fish is motored in makes the market's site seem vaguely arbitrary. If it's just a truck depot, it doesn't have to be on the water anymore. It could be anywhere, even Hunts Point in the Bronx, where a produce market already exists and where the city has been pushing to relocate the fish market since the 1970's.

An added pressure is that part of the market sits on choice waterfront real estate that could be developed as luxury housing. But those who love the old market where it is say it is about preserving a piece of living history and keeping it in an accessible part of the city so that even civilians can drop in and buy a dozen fish for a party while veterans can continue doing business where their families have for generations.

With all the forced, artificial connections that are being foisted on the New York waterfront in its 21st-century transformation, a fish market on the river's edge feels like the rightest of functions.

I used to come down to the Fulton Market in my 20's, mostly to eat at a great fish restaurant named Sweets. It was on the second floor and had sawdust on the planks and the slanted look of a ship galley out of Melville; it wasn't pricey and you could get a piece of fish grilled to your liking with a minimum of fuss or sauce. The old waiters didn't seem to mind serving me, although I was obviously an impostor, an aspiring writer pretending to be worldly.

Except for one last holdout, the wonderfully garlicky Carmine's on Beekman Street, all the legendary places — Sweets, Sloppy Louie's, the Paris Bar — are gone, and the suburban-style restaurants of the South Street Seaport have little connection with the market adjoining it. The Seaport itself — part idealistic museum, part tourist trap — and the Fulton Market coexist uneasily, the refrigerated trucks gone and the streets cleaned by 10 a.m., in time for the parking lot to be filled by the South Street Seaport's leisured clientele.

One Last Whiff

At 6:30 in the morning, when the market is starting to wind down, I go around the corner to the Market Grill at 40 Peck Slip, which is open all night and serves omelets and other breakfast staples. The television is on, the waitress is talking sports with one of her regulars, and a group of Korean diners are hanging around at the back tables laughing.

I pause to take in a last whiff of the place. Georg Simmel, in his essay "The Metropolis and Modern Life," remarked how modern cities privilege sight over the other senses, but the Fulton Market still offers a tie between sight and smell.

Beyond the burned-rubber scent of the F.D.R. Drive, you can still be brought up short by the ripe olfactory pungency of the Fulton Fish Market and the brackish East River.

Fish are the most transitory of human delights, next to cherry blossoms. If a week-old newspaper's prose is said to be good for nothing but wrapping fish, the week-old haddock claims not even that utility. As the commodity is perishable, so is the venue.

The Fulton Market, which has been called the last fish market of a Western metropolis still on its original site, hangs on, vibrant, raunchy, but under siege. So maybe you'd better get over there some midnight and see it and smell it for yourself.